CHAPTER 5 #3
“It's the water.” Charlie said it the way you say the name of a disease.
“The senior rights on Red Mesa Creek. Beck, you've been gone, you forget what it means out here.
We hold the oldest decree in the valley.
First in time, first in right. In a dry year everybody downstream gets what's left after Red Mesa takes its full share. Ours is the one dependable water for miles.” She closed the laptop, and the porch went darker.
“Vance is planning some downstream build, a development, a bigger cattle operation, something that can't exist without guaranteed water he can't get any other way. The ranch is beside the point. He's after the decree. The ground's just the thing the water's stapled to.”
Beck looked out at the black shapes of the mesas against the last grey light, and the creek down in the bottoms made its small endless sound, the same sound it had made every night of his boyhood, and he understood that a man in a clean suit who'd never thrown a rope in his life wanted to turn that sound off forever and pipe the water under a subdivision.
“He calls the note,” Beck said. “We can't pay one point four million in ninety days. We default. He forecloses. And then he's got it all.”
“And then he goes after the decree,” Charlie finished.
“The water leaves with the land. He's already pushing on it from the other side too.
Hutch says there's talk Vance'll claim we abandoned part of our right by not using it in the lean years.
Use it or lose it. He's coming at the water from two directions at once.” She reached over and gripped his wrist, hard, the way she had when they were kids and one of them was about to do something brave or stupid.
“I'm not telling you this so you'll fix it.
Nobody can fix it. I'm telling you so you know what's true before you decide how long you're staying.
Because Tucker's killing himself over a thing that's already lost, and I won't watch you walk in there and let him keep thinking there's a way out of this that anybody alive could find.”
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Beck stayed quiet for a long while.
Down past the porch rail, Eleanor's roses stood dying in the dark, and he thought about water hauled in droughts, about a woman on her knees in the dirt willing dead-looking canes back to bloom because she refused, flat refused, to let a thing die just because it would've been easier.
He thought about a shut-up tack room where the dust hung gold in the light and his gear waited under years of it because somebody couldn't bring himself to admit Beck wasn't coming back.
He thought about Laney — and her name came up unbidden, the way it always did, Charlie having mentioned in the same breath as the herd that the contract vet had agreed to stay on through all of it, for Jed and the animals, which meant the woman he'd left with a note was now tied to this same sinking ground he was standing on.
He thought about Tucker dreaming a number.
Across a decade he'd gotten good at exactly one thing.
Holding on. Eight seconds on two thousand pounds of animal that wanted nothing in the world but to throw him into the dirt and stomp the life out of him, every muscle in his body screaming to let go, to bail, to take the safe fall.
He'd been the best in the world at not letting go.
Ninety days is just a season. You've outlasted worse with your hands.
It was a reckless thought, the most reckless he'd had since the night he climbed into a truck and drove away from everything that mattered, and he knew it, the old heat of it climbing his spine like the first sun off the bunchgrass, that reckless warmth that had never once steered him anywhere but trouble.
Three hundred thousand against one point four million.
A dying herd, a high-risk foal, a man in a clean suit with the law's whole slow machinery on his side.
Everybody in the county would tell him it couldn't be done. His own brother had as good as told him to take his recklessness and spend it on somebody else's last shot. The smart money, the only money, said sell to Vance and salvage what dignity you could and walk.
He'd always been the Calhoun who walked.
Beck stood up out of the rocking chair. Below him the roses made their black ragged line, and beyond them the creek ran on in the dark — their creek, the water some smiling man meant to take and pipe away — and the mesas stood black and permanent over all of it the way he'd once thought the whole place was permanent and now knew better.
“Charlie,” he said, and his voice came out rough and quiet and certain in a way he hadn't heard it in ten years. “I'm not selling Red Mesa to that son of a bitch.”
“Beck.” She started to argue.
“Ninety days.” He turned and looked at his sister in the dark, and he set his thumb to the scar through his eyebrow and felt, for once, that he wasn't lying.
“One point four million. Vance holds the note and he's coming for the water.” A breath.
“So we hold the line. We make the payment, we keep the decree, and that smooth bastard goes home with nothing.” He looked back out at the dying roses, and something in him set hard as welded pipe.
“I don't know how yet. I just know I'm done being the one who leaves. I'm staying, and I'm going to save this place, or I'm going to break my fool neck trying. Either way, I'm not letting go of the rope.”